Tip Tuesday! Importing is Awesome in Autodesk PLM 360

Tip Tuesday! Importing is Awesome in Autodesk PLM 360

So if you’ve seen the Lego Movie, you’ll get that the blog title is a play on the catchy tune “Everything is Awesome” (and if you haven’t seen it, it’s a cute movie). If you’re new to PLM 360, one of the first things you probably want to do is import your information into your tenant. This can easily be done using the import tool provided. It’s been awhile since we’ve walked through this, so I thought I’d do an example using our latest configuration and a sample assembly I got from a Bill of Materials Template. I’m a big fan of both Lego and Star Wars so love that this example is of a mini X-Wing. I need to massage the Excel a bit to meet the format needed by the import tool and how I have my Items and BOM workspace configured. I’ve put a post on the discussion forum that will have both of these Excel sheets if want to play along at home. Here’s the sheet our ‘company’ has been using to manage their BOMs:

We’ll tweak the data a bit to fit into the sample import sheet (snagged this from Brian Schanen, so many of you may have this from training, else check the forum post).

The model isn’t really set up to show the subassemblies, so we’ll wing it (see what I did there?) and put in some reasonable level values. If you are doing an initial import, you’ll want to set the number field (which is usually configured to be autogenerated) to Editable just for the import and then change back.

When you set up the import project, be sure to set the level key:

and do the rest of the import settings. You can always refer to the Help topic Import for further details. It’s super important to remember when you are importing lifecycle and revisions, life cycle, revision, and release date must all be defined.

Once I run the import, I see my assembly with the structure I indicated in my Excel file:

I’ll be doing a live walk through of this example and others in our next PLM Talk. Join me on Wednesday March 18 at noon East Coast time and we’ll cover what’s important about importing!

–Michelle

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